Calpol dash was ‘child neglect’
Sian Griffiths, Education Editor Published: 23 November 2014
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Tim and Julie Haines with Iset, left, and Kiya, two of their five children (Adrian Sherratt)
A FAMILY came “within a hair’s breadth” of having their five children taken into care after the father was prosecuted for leaving their two-year-old daughter alone in the car for 10 minutes.
Tim Haines left his daughter outside a chemist in Evesham, Worcestershire, while he went to buy Calpol.
He returned to find two policeman by the car who said he should not have left the toddler alone. He was charged with child neglect and his children placed on a protection register.
It took a year to clear Haines’s name in court and to lift the threat of having the children removed. “We won, but we came within a hair’s breadth of losing our children,” said his wife, Julie.
The family have decided to speak out following the case of a mother in the West Midlands who was given a caution for leaving her six-year-old son alone for 45 minutes.
The government is facing calls to pass a “home alone” law that will make clear at what age and for how long children can be left unattended.
Back in 2004 when Haines parked on Evesham High Street, he could little have imagined the nightmare that was to follow. Returning from the school run, he remembered the family had run out of Calpol. After stopping close to a chemist’s, he dashed into the store without his daughter, Iset, whom he left in the car.
He returned less than 10 minutes later to be confronted by two police officers while Iset was standing happily on the driver’s seat. “They gave me all sorts of grief about leaving my daughter alone in the car, said I had bald tyres and refused to let me drive it, so I walked home with Iset in my arms,” said Haines. “I thought that was the end of it but a few weeks later there was a knock at the door and there were two policemen there to arrest me.”
Haines, who is a family law advocate, was prosecuted for “wilful exposure of a child to risk of significant harm”; the children were placed on the child protection register; and the couple then had a “nightmare year” fighting to clear Haines’s name and save their family.
The family spoke out this weekend after reading in The Sunday Times about Joan, who is battling to get a caution for child neglect removed from her record after she left her son home alone while she had a driving lesson.
As a result of these cases and others, the government is being pressed to pass a “home alone” law setting out clear guidelines governing at what age and for how long children can be left unattended. Currently the law says only that parents should not leave children alone if they will be placed at risk, but there is no minimum age.
Earlier this month John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley, tabled a parliamentary question seeking clarity. He said: “It is not at all clear for how long and at what age children can be left alone. Nor is it clear whether leaving them alone is either not an issue, a child-protection issue or a criminal issue.”
The Haines’s nightmare ended only in the summer of 2005 — almost a year after Haines had left his daughter in the car — when the couple succeeded in getting the children’s names removed from the child protection register.
By then Haines had had his conviction overturned on appeal. A district judge in the magistrates’ court had initially found him guilty of the offence of wilful exposure. He was given an absolute discharge.
“I was not happy to have an offence of child cruelty on my record so I appealed to the Crown Court. The prosecution offered no evidence and the court struck the matter out. Hearing what I had done, the judge said: ‘Is that supposed to be a crime?’ ” said Haines.
Iset as a toddler
Every step of the way the family also battled social services, which had placed the children on the child protection register after the incident. Eventually the family courts ordered the children to be assessed by an independent social worker, who gave the Haines’s parenting a clean bill of health.
“I was sick with anxiety the entire time the children’s names were on the register,” said Julie Haines. “Social services sent us five care plans for each of our kids. I ripped them up and pushed them back under the social services office door. We wrote our own plans and submitted them to the family courts. They weren’t used to dealing with articulate middle-class people. I feel very lucky. We could easily have lost our kids.”
Four out of five of the Haines’s children were cathedral choristers; two are now at university while the other three are still at school. “They are great kids and we are good parents,” said Haines.
Julie Haines added: “My view is that parents have to be allowed to assess the risk themselves. All of us have left children home alone at some point. Technically, you are presumably not even allowed to leave a child in a car at a petrol station while you go to pay but everyone does.”
The Sunday Times story two weeks ago about Joan and her six-year-old son prompted a national debate on the age at which it is reasonable for a child to be left alone. Justine Roberts, chief executive of the Mumsnet online parenting forum, said: “The consensus [on Mumsnet] is that it really comes down to the individual child.”
The Department for Education said: “The law is clear that parents can be prosecuted if they leave a child unsupervised in a manner likely to cause unnecessary suffering or injury to health.”
West Mercia police said it had a duty to investigate all concerns regarding the care of children. Worcestershire county council said any child protection case took “account of all the facts and opinions of professionals and the family”.
